- Two people who hate each other get tricked into falling in love with each other.
- A man discovers that he has spontaneously turned into a beetle overnight.
- There are dinosaurs living in the centre of the planet Earth.
- Of their own volition, animals manufacture and wear clothes that perfectly mimic the human fashions of the time.
- Fairies can be brought back to life if humans applaud hard enough.
- Farm animals declare themselves independent of humans and create their own flag and anthem.
- A pair of human parents birth a son who looks exactly like a mouse.
- A dead woman turns into another woman and comes back to life.
- A woman falls in love with a man who has been nothing but abusive to her.
All of them are from classic, famous stories.* I am sure that you can think of some wildly popular fiction that astonishes you with the amount of stupidity it contains.
Yet readers love these stories. You may even recognise a favourite of yours in the list above.
When did you start to think that other people's ideas are better than yours? And when did you start to believe that your ideas have to be cool and amazing and interesting in order to be worthwhile? When did we all become so arrogant and "up ourselves" that we decided our ideas have to be The Absolute Best And Coolest before they are worth anything at all?
One of the tremendous benefits of writing is that you can take a stupid idea, follow it to its logical conclusion, explore it — either completely straightly or tongue-in-cheek — and see where you end up. You may be pleasantly surprised or intrigued by what you find along the way.
My book We Are Both Mammals was inspired by a dream I had. The premise is rather macabre: a man wakes to find that he has been the unconsenting patient of experimental surgery, and is now permanently joined by a hose to a member of another species, a creature who functions as his living life-support system.
Some readers have loved this story and consider it magnificent and thought-provoking. Some hated it and thought its premise stupid. I, as its writer, am very proud of it.
If I were not a writer, I would have shrugged off the dream's concept of a possum-like creature joined by a hose to a human and keeping the latter alive, as daft and gruesome nonsense, and forgotten about it. But it is no more ridiculous (or macabre) than a great many science-fiction stories. In fact, one could argue that the entire point of speculative fiction (that is, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror) is that we can use it to explore ideas unhindered by the constraints of our own reality, and that whether those ideas are "stupid" or not is irrelevant.
Moreover, if you keep second-guessing your ideas, you will never finish any stories. Everything is stupid if you think it is, and the more you think about the stupidness of your idea, the stupider it will seem, and then you will discard it without realising that there might have been a snippet of it that was very cool and not at all stupid, which you could have built up into something you really liked.
What happens if you follow your stupid idea to its logical conclusion? What happens if you double down on the stupidity and take it to an extreme? What happens if you reverse or invert the idea? What happens if your characters don't notice that the idea is stupid? What happens if you make it a bit less stupid in one area but take it to an extreme in another? What if you mash it up with another stupid idea? What happens if you punch the stupid idea in the face, drag it into an alley, and see if it has anything interesting in its pockets?
If the idea still seems stupid, write it down anyway. Just give it a few sentences; one minute of your time. It seems stupid now, but in a year's time you may come across it again and suddenly see how to make it brilliant. It may simmer away in your brain, dawdling about in a murky corner, then one day collide with another, much better, idea, and now it seems amazing. Once an idea is written down, you are free to ignore it, even forget about it, without losing it.
If you can't come up with any ideas, be they stupid or not, that interest you even a tiny bit, and you're starting to think that every idea you have ever had is terrible, then you are probably tired and grumpy and you need to stop trying to come up with ideas and instead go and eat, rest, and play.
In summation: yes, all of your ideas probably are stupid. So are everyone else's. Any idea will seem stupid if you think about it for long enough. The point is not to come up with non-stupid ideas. The point is to write your stories, and you will never do that if you are hung up on how stupid they are.
*(In order: Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth by Jules Verne, The Tale Of Peter Rabbit and most other stories by Beatrix Potter, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Stuart Little by E. B. White, 'Ligeia' by Edgar Allan Poe; and the last is a trope that can be found in any number of stories by men who think that being cruel to women is an effective and acceptable way to woo them.)
